Archive for the ‘Advertising Photography’ Category

You need one of these… you have one of these… whether you know it or not…

The secret is in the photoshop “Photomerge” panorama machine… Figure it out you will love the results…

Here we have a photo which would normally be made with a 35mm wide angle lens (on a full frame 35mm digital camera). But instead I have pieced together 75 photos taken with a 200mm lens…

Because this is a 2 gigabyte file (or more) you can zoom in and see people climbing the mountain from 5 1/2 to 6 miles away (Canon 70 to 200mm L lens 1/640th at f10)Here are some other multi shot panoramas made with telephoto lenses (mostly an 85mm f1.8 Canon which I think is the perfect panorama lens).

Young and old trees… The real benefit on this panorama was adjusting the focus closer on the right hand part to make the bark come into focus.

Using and 85mm lens gives me a wider view with a 3 shot panorama and I avoid the wide angle perspective of the background being really far away.

This is a 7 shot 85mm wide angle view. I did not want the mountain to be small in the photo like a wide angle lens would have done. So I used my wide view telephoto and photo shop’s “photomerge”.

I did not want the Mountain (Rainier) to recede into the distant (small) background as it would with a wide angle lens. So this is a 6 or 7 shot 85mm wide view panorama.

I am an ex UPI employee so I don’t care much for AP (they act too much like a monopoly and helped kill UPI for one thing)… I would never work for them because of their “work for hire” “rights grabbing” contract anyway.

But it is bugging me… this last thing when they fired one of their well thought of photographers for spotting out a distracting element in a photo. For the record… I have never produced a photograph for newspaper or magazine that wasn’t painstakingly burned, dodged, spotted for dirt, treated with potassium ferricyanide, cropped, selected over another photo for artistic or informational rationale, or had the color or tone shifted to make it a “better” photograph capable of conveying the situation in the best way possible to the end reader.

That’s what we all want is for the photo to be transcendent… (not in the way of the information).

AP cut ties with Contreras publicly after the photographer informed the wire service that he had removed a video camera from a corner of an image of a Syrian rebel soldier taking cover during a fire fight. Contreras says he knew it could end his relationship with AP, but that he didn’t expect to be shut out of the process.

Was this firing really necessary? Was the picture compromised? I doubt it. Really, the picture doesn’t tell you much anyway so that presents another problem where the cutline writer can spin it anyway he/she wants. (In the old days Pravda was humorously famous for making up cutlines that were just amazingly fake.)

Here are two examples of my own work which would probably get me fired I guess. When it comes to the scenic of the boat which photo is fake? As far as I am concerned the retouched one is actually more accurate than the dead looking one from the unprocessed RAW image the camera produced. Under AP rules are we supposed to be stuck looking at dead, automaton generated purely “documentary” crap a camera produces. Then I guess you don;t need photographers to interpret the RAW file because there is no need for “artistic” or “explanatory” efforts in news photography, right? What a load of crap IMHO.

In another example I worked on a food shoot yesterday. And I am always looking for a better way to enthusiastically promote my client’s efforts to produce a quality product and sell more stuff (so they can afford to pay me help them sell more stuff). But back to “accuracy” Which photo is more accurate?

This one photo should be self explanatory. We needed a full sized trade show print for this 16 foot kayak…. A single exposure, even on 4×5 film, wasn’t going to get the results I wanted since we just didn’t have enough head room in the studio to get it without using a wide angle lens and making the pointed ends even pointier than they should be. So multiple shots with a normal lens did the job.